For a month now, Vanadzor local press and TV have been advertising the opening of an Internet dating agency.

Visiting http://www.life-and-love.net, a German web page residents can look through the candidate offering friendship or marriage. The webpage has been functioning since last November and is available in English, German, Russian and Armenian.

The initiative of opening the meeting venue, considered an innovation for a small town like Vanadzor, belongs to “Trichk” educational, cultural and counseling NGO.

Hovik Nikoghosyan, the President of the NGO, saw the web page of the agency quite by chance, got acquainted with the person in charge – Rita Kral Makichyan, Armenian by descent, and decided to localize it.

4,000 people from Europe, the USA, Armenia, and Russia have trusted the offer of the web page to make acquaintances in a few months and meet their life companions.

“Love knows no boundaries, that is why it does not matter at all how old you are, where you are from and what language you speak. Our employees, who speak several languages, will help you with all the issues concerning establishing and maintaining correspondence with the person you choose,” the people responsible for maintaining the site say in the Armenian version of the website.

Cost for a cure for loneliness is $19 a year.

The online agency has two representative offices in Armenia – one in Yerevan, and one in Vanadzor.

One may also sign up without applying to the agency’s representatives, by paying online through credit card.

Trichk (NGO) says its role – unusual perhaps for a non governmental organization – is to advertise the service, assist those who want to sign up, arrange meetings and even provide counseling.

“Girls and women are mostly shy. They want to, but they don’t feel comfortable, they feel embarrassed, we explain to them that if a man has the right to choose, you have that right as well,” explains Nikoghosyan.

Nikoghosyan says that so far 50 people of different ages from Lori province have signed up: 30 women or girls, and 20 young men.

A 51-year old woman was helped by a colleague to sign up, and now the colleague is helping her to write and respond to letters.

“She doesn’t know how to use the Internet, and I help her with pleasure,” several times a week a Vanadzor employee of the agency Stella Kocharyan helps the older woman from Lori, who is divorced and wishes to remarry.
“She is still communicating, she is interested, she gets letters, she writes herself,” Stella says.

The youngest signed-up resident of Lori is 18 years old (the agency accepts people of 18 and older). Nikoghosyan says that the people who sign up here are mostly looking for a life companion, but there are also people who are looking for friends to communicate with.

The operators of http://www.life-and-love.net monitor the correspondence to prevent offensive messages.

“This is, basically, a ‘matchmaker,’ a mediator to help meet and then marry a person, that creates a more relaxed space for communication. In Soviet times many people met through a matchmaker, and that created interdependence between families – necessarily leading to a marriage, in the case of the Internet it is not like that, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to go on seeing the person,” Nikoghosyan says.

He tells about a 71-year old man who signed up and stressed in his application that he was looking for a well-groomed woman.

Although the majority of Vanadzor youth are using www.odnoklassniki.ru, the popular Russian website, their attitude to the existence of the Internet agency is not unambiguous.

For them, Odnoklassniki is not a way to meet the future spouse, but only a way to meet people and a means of communicating with far-away relatives.

“People will say – you must have been in a tight corner to have applied here,” says 25-year old Anahit Danielyan.

Although many people in her circles have got married with the help of the Internet and she treats internet-assisted acquaintances and marriages seriously, she will definitely not apply to avoid becoming “the talk of the small town.”

“I have even got a marriage proposal on the Internet, but I just laughed at it, that’s all,” says 23-year old Anzhela Harutyunyan.

For her, Internet-assisted marriage is unacceptable – it contradicts the Armenian mentality.

“Such marriages are interesting for me, I know they are very happy, but in any case it is unacceptable for me,” Anzhela says.

23-year old Artur Sukiasyan will not even allow his sister or his female relatives to look for acquaintances on the Internet.

“People using the Internet have created an unserious atmosphere themselves,” Artur says.